IT'S JUSTIN, LIVE! ALL DAY, ALL NIGHT! / S.F. startup puts camera on founder's head for real-time feed, and a star is born

Jessica Guynn, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PDT, Friday, March 30, 2007

4:44PM: Justin Kan of Justin.tv wears a video camera that's on 24/7. Her arely takes the camera off. The San Francisco startup has used the real-time feed to create an online television reality show starring Kan and his partners, roommates and friends as they deal with the explosion of fan responses and corporate offers they're receiving.
Photo by Kim Komenich/The Chronicle
**Justin Kan less

4:44PM: Justin Kan of Justin.tv wears a video camera that's on 24/7. Her arely takes the camera off. The San Francisco startup has used the real-time feed to create an online television reality show starring ... more

Photo: Kim Komenich

Photo: Kim Komenich

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4:44PM: Justin Kan of Justin.tv wears a video camera that's on 24/7. Her arely takes the camera off. The San Francisco startup has used the real-time feed to create an online television reality show starring Kan and his partners, roommates and friends as they deal with the explosion of fan responses and corporate offers they're receiving.
Photo by Kim Komenich/The Chronicle
**Justin Kan less

4:44PM: Justin Kan of Justin.tv wears a video camera that's on 24/7. Her arely takes the camera off. The San Francisco startup has used the real-time feed to create an online television reality show starring ... more

Photo: Kim Komenich

IT'S JUSTIN, LIVE! ALL DAY, ALL NIGHT! / S.F. startup puts camera on founder's head for real-time feed, and a star is born

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Just call him Air Justin.

Eleven days ago, 23-year-old Justin Kan was just another no-name startup guy with big dreams of the small screen. Then he and his friends launched Justin.tv, an Internet reality show chronicling their adventures as young San Francisco entrepreneurs that, at least for now, is proving to be a smash hit with online viewers.

Kan calls it "lifecasting." The concept is simple: Using technology his team developed, Kan has strapped a camera to his head to capture every moment of his existence in live streaming video on the Internet. Viewers literally see the world through Kan's virtual eyes, which broadcast his life onto the Web 24/7. He interacts with his audience through 21 chat rooms and hundreds of e-mails each day. He even took their calls on his cell phone until he got overwhelmed.

The show's slogan says it all: "Waste time watching other people waste time." And that's what tens of thousand of folks around the globe are doing, turning Kan into an online phenom by tuning in to his irreverent and uncensored world. That sudden explosion of peeping onlookers has caused so many technical difficulties that Justin.tv had to recruit volunteers from the audience to keep the show rolling.

Viewers seem to delight in playing along with their new online idol, cramming chat rooms and pulling pranks on him, first calling 911 to report a stabbing in the group's apartment (prompting some friends to give Kan a bullet-proof vest for the next time officers burst in, guns drawn), then reporting a fire there. San Francisco emergency dispatchers, leery of any more false alarms, now call to confirm there's an actual emergency before responding. So fans moved on to different sorts of pranks, such as ordering $63 worth of pizza to be delivered to Justin.tv's door.

Instant fame has had some pretty dramatic results. Kan's inbox overflows with praise ("please go off the air, you're ruining my life with your addictive site") and questions particularly of the personal nature, such as what will he do when he masturbates or has sex on-screen.

Meanwhile, Emmett Shear, 23, and Kyle Vogt, 21, who comprise the technical team, have barely slept in a desperate effort to keep up with the ever-increasing traffic. Michael Seibel, the show's 24-year-old producer, appears to have a cell phone permanently attached to his ear.

Kan jokes that he should hire a full-time assistant just to accept all the new friend requests on MySpace and Facebook. He's already getting noticed on the street. And he is getting flattering attention -- and even his first onscreen kiss -- from his most coveted demographic: starstruck young hotties. (He has lined up three blind dates this weekend). Coming in a close second: Fans who treat him and his cash-strapped gang to dinner. Those fan get an on-air shout-out.

"Eventually my ego is going to be the size of the planet Earth," Kan said.

The business model centers on product placement. Already corporate sponsors are lining up to plug their products alongside Zipcar rentals and Bawls energy drink, both of which have posters on the walls of Justin.tv's headquarters in North Beach. The apartment is four blocks from where the movie "Ed TV," in which a video clerk agrees to have his life videotaped for network TV, was filmed. And Hollywood producers, charged with figuring out new strategies for delivering shows to viewers, are looking to get a piece of the action even though the production values are as crude as the Justin.tv vocabulary.

Of course, Justin.tv is a new twist on an old idea, piggybacking on earlier hits such as MTV's "Real World" and Jennicam, an Internet site run by a young woman who in 1996 became one of the first to install webcams in her home so viewers could observe every aspect of her private life. Kan hopes his show's budding success will power a Justin.tv network complete with a lineup of shows, including a "Sex and the City"-inspired tale to be filmed in Manhattan.

"We want to find people far more charismatic and attractive than me to go out and do this," Kan said.

All the runaway hype begs the question: Will Justin.tv be fad or flop?

Andrew Keen, a sharp critic of the self-broadcasting movement whose book "The Cult of the Amateur" comes out in June, says this brand of digital narcissism not only will fail, it will be recalled with shame in more sober economic times, just like the dot-coms of the late 1990s.

"This is the last gasp of the Web 2.0 boom," Keen said. "People are going to look back at this and say, 'This makes Second Life look like the BBC.' I think even Justin will look back on it and be embarrassed.

"This (show) attracts people who are profoundly bored with their lives and are waiting for the next media fix. They will go on to the next thing when they get bored of this thing. It has no legs."

Months ago, when The Chronicle first met the Justin.tv crew as they were in the early planning phase, the show certainly seemed like a gamble. Would people with lives of their own sit around and watch Kan live his, even when he's just spending face time with his laptop or going to the bathroom with the camera discreetly pointed toward the ceiling?

Justin.tv is more than ready for prime time, insists Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, which provided seed money for the company. The business incubator usually gives the companies it sponsors about $5,000 per founder.

"Of the 39 startups we've funded so far, Justin.TV might have the most potential," Graham said. "Ultimately their plan is to have hundreds of people with these cameras. Each would be a channel; viewers would watch whichever was most interesting at that time. With hundreds of people, there would always be something interesting. So why would anyone even switch on their TV?

"If this doesn't scare the s -- out of TV networks, it's only because they don't understand it yet. TV is moving to the Internet especially for the 18- to 35-(year-old) males the TV networks can barely hang onto now."

Kan's concept is another step in rewriting the script for programming, said John Furrier, CEO of Podtech.net, a Silicon Valley podcasting network. "It's not about what it is today but what it will turn into. A lot of people will be quick to dismiss the quality of his programming. And it will be crude at first. But it will evolve very quickly."

To get an idea of what Justin.tv is all about right now, picture four guys gone wild in a two-bedroom apartment littered with disheveled furniture, empty beer cans, remnants of pizza crust and randomly strewn socks and shoes. On a giant white board is the show's apparent goal: Jay Leno, 30 days or less. On another smaller white board is a long list of possible activities for Kan, from going to a shooting range to making a deposit at a sperm bank.

Advertisers' banners adorn the walls. Even Hearst Castle is an unofficial sponsor. The Justin.tv crew, frustrated that the castle was closed during a recent road trip, "borrowed" one of its flags. Kan is fixated on getting Budweiser as a sponsor, which would help with the drain on the thirsty startup's budget.

Kan, who says he grew up a shy introvert in an upper-middle-class family in Seattle, has a bona fide exhibitionist streak. A Yale physics and philosophy grad turned high-tech entrepreneur, he once posed lathered in shaving cream for a college pin-up calendar to raise money for tsunami relief, and he sold his first Internet company in an attention-getting stunt on eBay.

Now his average day alternates between a blur of antics and long spells of boredom. Kan never takes the camera off unless he's sleeping. That's the only time the camera actually films him instead of his perspective on the world. Viewers, tired of waiting for him to rise, like to egg his roommates on to wake him. On a recent morning, they poured a glass of water on him.

Kan likes to think and talk about himself as a man of the people, so he gets out in the world when he can. Highlights from earlier this week: a walk to pick up coffee -- Kan started drinking it a month ago to get more pep earlier in the day -- a flurry of media interviews and lunch in South Park with his No. 1 fan, friend Seeyuen Lee. Lee began watching Justin.tv before it launched. "Now that they have thousands of viewers, everyone wants to be Justin's No. 1 fan, but I am squatting on the title," she said.

Later, Kan headed for the Museum of Modern Art to meet with the folks at Podtech, then to take his friend and neighbor, Steve Huffman, who became a millionaire by selling his startup Reddit to Wired Digital, shopping for a Corvette at Ellis Brooks Chevrolet.

No errand is ordinary when you have a camera strapped to your head. Kan, who ran out of clean socks, walked to Fisherman's Wharf to buy some more at the Gap but was kicked out when he refused to stop shooting. Soon he got an e-mail from a viewer: "Hey Justin I gave a call to that Gap store hah. I told the guy you had 1,000 people watching the camera live and he just looked like a dick to the whole Internet."

Rather than return empty-handed to the apartment, Kan wandered across the street to watch breakdancers as the sun set on the bay. As he took in the booming music and acrobatic moves, he became still for the first time all day, and, for a moment, appeared alone in the crowd. "It's nice to watch someone else perform instead of me," he said.

Kan realizes there are downsides to so much notoriety. He and Seibel have to instant message each other with phone numbers and other sensitive information they don't want to go out on the air. And, despite all the attention, Kan has never before been so isolated. He spends far more time interacting with strangers than his own family.

With a show that runs more on impulse than inspiration, Kan has considered banning his parents' IP addresses from accessing the site. He doesn't want them to see him acting "like an ass," he says.

Then the moment passes, and he's off again, drawn to the glow of an evening spent with friends over pizza and poker. When some of Vogt's friends from MIT show up, they can't believe the show is for real. So Kan tells viewers that if they send 100 e-mails in 20 minutes, the entire gang will dive into the swimming pool completely clothed. Kan clocks 300 messages.

With that kind of response, Kan says he has no intention of turning off the camera anytime soon.

"We will keep going as long as it's fun and as long as it's relevant," he said. "I figure that will be for a long time to come. ... If I wasn't starting this company, I would be starting another company. It's my job. It's my life."